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    • “The future is very, very bright”
    Suffolk

    “The future is very, very bright”

    Caradoc Wyn Posted on

    East Lansing — Mark Dantonio was at his home in Florida last summer when his phone rang. On the other side was Michigan State athletic director Alan Haller, who had some exciting news to share.

    Haller told Dantonio on that call that his name would appear in Spartan Stadium’s Ring of Honor this season.

    “Unbelievable,” Dantonio said Friday. “To have my name listed among the greatest Spartans in history…that speaks to a lot of different people working, but I’ll share that, it’s a monumental thing.”

    Michigan State began showering Dantonio in celebration Friday night at an exclusive event. Among those in attendance were Haller, men’s basketball coach and friend Tom Izzo, and dozens of Dantonio’s former players.

    On Saturday, Dantonio, the winningest coach in school history, will be honored again at the Spartans’ football game against No. 3 Ohio State when his name, forever etched into the crown of Spartan Stadium, is officially unveiled.

    Gratitude, pride and a sense of achievement will certainly flow through Dantonio at this moment. There is also a question that will probably come to his mind as well.

    “Who would have thought?” said Dantonio. “Who would have thought?”

    Dantonio never imagined he would be more than just a Mid-American Conference football coach. He first came to Michigan State 30 years ago to work as an assistant coach on Nick Saban’s staff. The relationships he developed during his time alongside Saban paved the way for his return as the Spartans’ head coach in 2007.

    Dantonio helped turn a struggling program into a perennial contender in one of college football’s toughest leagues. He posted a program-best 114 wins in his 13 seasons, as well as three Big Ten championships and the school’s only appearance in the College Football Playoff in 2015. He retired in 2020 and was replaced by Mel Tucker.

    Dantonio’s 13 years created a standard of excellence that Michigan State football is now looking to rekindle with first-year head coach Jonathan Smith.

    “When I first came here as a head coach, I pointed to the past (to show the possibility) of being successful here,” said Dantonio, a member of the College Football Hall of Fame Class of 2024. “It can I.” Say the same thing, you’ve probably been successful in the past. If you’ve done something once, hopefully you’ll be more likely to be able to do it again. You can do a bit of hunting. That’s what we did.”

    Dantonio, who will also participate in an “on-campus salute” Saturday night before his induction into the College Football Hall of Fame in December, called the recognition he received this year “program rewards.”

    “These are things you can’t do without a lot of people, and everyone has to point in the right direction, do their job and do their job brilliantly,” he said. “When we came here we wanted to build a legacy. And we did that as a program.

    “My name may be up there, but I hope everyone feels a piece of it when they look at it.”

    Dantonio, 68, retired after 41 years of coaching, still attends Michigan State when he can and attends football and basketball games. Every now and then, though, he gets excited about the chance to coach for another day. But he’s not interested in doing the “X’s” and “O’s” or the blissful feeling of coaching a team to a win that he missed. Instead, it’s the relationships he’s built with his players.

    Dantonio always talked about closing circles. On Saturday, when he sees his name engraved on the stadium he has called home for more than 13 years, it will feel like he has done just that.

    “When I got here I wanted to compete in terms of condition, I think we achieved that. Keep our players going, send players to the NFL and think we’ve done these things. “Winning Big 10 championships, that’s what we did,” Dantonio said. “And the last thing we wanted to do was leave a legacy, leave something that people could say, ‘Hey, they did it right, they were successful at what they did.’ And I think we succeeded.”

    Dantonio believes the Spartans are in good hands with Jonathan Smith at the helm.

    “I’m very, very positive about the direction Coach Smith is going to take,” Dantonio said. “I saw all the games, they are very resilient as a football team. I think that comes from the head coach. They can play through the smoke… (if something bad happened) they can get up and play the next game and be successful. So you see that, and now it’s Year 1, Game No. 5, and there’s a lot of positives to point to as well, and I think the future is very, very bright.”

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    @madkenney

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    Caradoc Wyn
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